


Left For Dead

by newcanaan



Category: Fallout - Fandom, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/F, courier meets courier!!, drugs and alcohol, no more than whats in the game, some violence and shooting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2020-05-16 02:21:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19308682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newcanaan/pseuds/newcanaan
Summary: A gift for my wonderful friend, of her courier and mine meeting one another (yeehaw)!!I hope you like it <3 <3 <3 <3





	1. We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Matry!!](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Matry%21%21).



            The Outpost was a dim hub of empty light, the last of its kind on the horizon, drawing them like moths to a drunken flame.

            She had been wandering for three weeks. To the south, the sand was bleached white and the sky a kind of holy blue. She had followed the road in the midday ferocity, dragging her body further and further until she was sure she would stumble and fall in on herself.  
            Pieces of her were collapsing over and over again in their restless cycle, and she had kept walking because she swore that was all she could do.

            The crows had been wheeling in the sky forever, waiting on time’s certainty of another meal. It was only her left, her and the crows and the distant lines of soldiers. And how they had carried their flags, the courier had thought, as if the sand cared who was passing over it.

             Flavia pulled down her scarf. The infernal heat had festered inside of her, humming beneath her skin. The sun had swallowed her whole.

            And then it had sunk under the whole world, under a hollow sea, and the night had seized the sky all at once. They would swear they had never known an emptiness like it.

            It was getting colder by the minute, or so the pallid eyes and the sad dying moans told her. They were left destitute by the sight perhaps, and the premonitions of wars marching over the ground.

            Flavia passed through the gates without a word.

            “Caravan, citizen, pilgrim or . . .” It had been a lifetime since she’d heard a language spoken.

            “Courier.”

            In the cattle pens, the fires were burning low, and the bodies shook in another fit of Pyscho, or perhaps the dullness and the coldness of the Mojave had finally reached the marrow of their bones.  
            The courier passed them by.

She needed a drink. And a smoke, goddamit, she thought, emptying the last pack she had.

            There was a light in the tower. It had illuminated the sickness hanging in the air; the miasmic radiation that was begging to be found. Her gaze was remote – since the moment she was born and her mother had sworn she had the eyes of somebody who already knew that the world had ended – and was becoming saddening with the years scored into her.  
            Flavia drew the scarf back around her.

She passed a soldier on the way to the barracks, staggering down to the pit stop – “Hey, girlie,” – and she shoved her shoulder into him.

             The bar was clamouring with soldiers.

 “Whiskey,” she said, turning over a glass.

The woman looked up at her, still polishing a glass. “How’s anyone hear you when you’re wearing that thing?”

            Flavia did not give her the time of day. She could not resist the demand, however, to retie it, but no, not in a place like that. She swore some people weren’t cut out to be in the company of others.   

            “Christ, Lacey, just get the woman her drink.”

            “Thought I kicked you out of here,” the woman replied. The corners of her mouth twitched.

            “You flirtin’ with me?” The stranger put out her cigarette out on the bar.

They didn’t take a seat, thank God, but they glanced over her nonetheless. Flavia looked the other way – the last universal law acknowledged in a place like that – knowing nothing between heaven and earth would make her look back.

            When they turned their back on her, she saw the sign of the Mojave Express across their shoulder. Jesus Christ, it seemed ancient to her now, and she did not allow herself to become unsettled by that.

“Leave it,” she said, pulling the bottle out of the woman’s hand. God knew she needed it. There was a corner of the bar still left for her. The other tables were filled with Blackjack and Caravan and everything else that they plied their hopes on to. She was becoming sick to death with it.

            Flavia swallowed the drink, and another, and again until the room was beginning to blur and everybody’s stares stopped cutting into her back. She let out a breath. The last round hit her like a train.

            By the bar, there was a pack of soldier boys red-faced and glowing with patriotism, and she would not meet their eyes, she was bored of their people already and the endless, endless righteousness of the NCR but they were – of all things – a lesser evil.

            She got to her feet. It was a relief to feel the Mojave air rush back to her. Above her, the Ranger was still standing on the roof of the barracks, the same place Flavia had left her last time.

Flavia leant against the edge of the rooftop. “You still standing up here?”

The Ranger looked over her shoulder. “You alright Morales?” Her face was white.

“Saw a ghost.” She drank some whiskey from the bottle. The woman returned her gaze to the horizon.  

“Surpirsed anybody’s else’s still here. Mojave’s turning to shit. Wouldn’t blame anybody for turnin’ tail now.”

Flavia watched her from a drunken distance.

“But if you’re looking for work,” the Ranger turned to her, “I need somebody down in Nipton, I need to know what happened there.”

            Flavia raised her eyebrows. That was getting too close to Legion territory. But she was never afraid to put down a dying dog. “Fine. For old time’s sake.”

-

“Another one?”

            Boxcars ran the cigarette back and forth along the table. When he finally lit, it came with some relief, because he had been still for so long she thought he might have died and it was only the dead rolling the cigarette, wondering what it might be.

            He threw the lighter on the floor.

“Which way?”

He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m just the messenger.”

            There was a line of Med-X waiting for him on the table. The Legion had busted his knees up beyond repair, and he was sweating down his back and his temples something fierce.

            He took the first needle in his hand, and his head rolled back in relief; something had possessed him, made his eyes roll back and his veins press against his skin. The cigarette was burning itself out.

            He pointed to the door. “Get out.”

            She could not stay witness to his life eclipsing around him like that – needle after needle – with the pale terrible walls and the rancour of ecstasy and piss, with his terrible legs as he turned into stone. Flavia stood by the door.

“Get out,” he threw a book at the door. Some places, she supposed, were haunted, and others haunted by them. She had offered to shoot him, or take him to a doctor, because the sight was too much even for her, but he’d only sat their rolling his cigarette across the table with a dark expression.

            And finally the pain or the waiting had become too much for him and he picked up the lighter for one last smoke before he could leave the miseries of the world behind.

            The men up on the crucifixes were dead. Somebody had already put a bullet in their heads.

Down the road, the Legion fires were still burning and the dogs baying. They avoided Flavia though. Even Legion dogs knew of couriers.

            And another, like her? There was no one like her.

She made a fire on the roadside to sleep by but when she dreamed she dreamed of Boxcar’s eyes and the Legion fires and a courier who she could not remember.

            She did not remember much of anything those days. Instead she watched the fire die out with an empty whiskey bottle to her chest until the sun came up.

-

            The casino floor was teething. Flavia could not wait to be rid of the place.  
She did not belong in a casino like that, and only the thought of the open Nevada sky was getting her by.    

            It was one job – a favour for somebody she did not like to owe – but a kick in the teeth nonetheless. She had another drink. Across the bar, she watched a woman order a bourbon. Up on the stage, an out-of-tune impersonator was getting booed off.  The rest of the entertainment was not seeming optimistic either.

            Flavia did not intend to gamble while she was there, which did not do well for any cover for her in a place like that – although she did not intend to stay long enough to face any consequences for it. Most of the local colour had made a meagre effort to dress to the nines, or the sixes for Freeside, she supposed. Flavia had walked in fresh from the desert and she did not plan to change that.

The gentlemen had left the roulette table to go up to his room.  
            She crossed the floor of the Atomic Wrangler. The twins watched her anxiously from the bar, perhaps she was gaining a reputation after all. Flavia did not need long. She turned the corner.

            Half way up the stairs, she passed by a stranger, and for a reason beyond her own nature or instinct she stopped.

            Flavia could smell perfume. They hesitated, as if by chance, and looked at her. Flavia would not look back – she did not need to – she could feel their eyes on her. It was a terrible feeling, like somebody opening her up and seeing everything inside her chest she did not want them to know. Something in her body did not allow her to move from the spot.

But they had looked at her: stared for a moment at her and all the possibilities within her, all of her histories and stories and the way her eyes burned through them. Her heart settled in her chest. Perhaps that sudden manner of allowing herself to be seen became the greatest of its kind, not to have shown herself to the world but for the world to have looked back.

Flavia turned. A lifetime passed between them, and she met her eyes, quiet, aloof, and wondered about everything they had seen and everything they had known, and then she carried on up the stairs. The stranger returned to the floor.

Outside the door, Flavia took the handgun from her belt and knocked twice.

-

            They came one by one.            
She recalled dimly looking up at the sky the night before, a blur of black and blue hallowed by fire, when the stars begin to appear. One first, she counted – wearing down on her bones to resist the child’s urge to point up at them – aching at the edge of whatever galaxy rose above them, then a second, a third, violent red, a fourth not wanting to be found.

The air opened to the nuclear miasmas of sea-green emptiness, the septic lungs of the Camp and its last prayers. That was what happened, she supposed, when you let a bomb off in the middle of the town.

            It was a horrific bounty – like crows circling a carcass – standing there on the last ridge of sanctuary before the abandoned little highway. Wherever there was looting to be had scavengers were sure to follow.  

            Flavia looked across the ground through the round eyes of a gas mask. Her breath was rattling.

The wind had picked up, lashing sand across the open ground. Flavia pulled her scarf around her neck to protect her bare skin, but the Mojave was racing its hands over her, desperate for some loose string to pull.

            The troopers, however, did not move.

They stood like sleepwalkers. Some hibernal dream, some ancient command had come over them, the knowledge it seemed that they would die an inch away of salvation – begging for the name of a God they could not remember to find their end. A thousand ghosts had surrounded her. Her expression drew tight, protecting her from their miseries, protecting them from her own.

            She could not look away.

            Not till their eyes, eyes of milk, eyes of the blind, rolled towards her. Flavia’s body went cold. She could not recall seeing the sun disappear behind the last blizzard of the sandstorm.

It was a mercy killing, when she shot them down. And the bodies did not look right there: their skin was falling away, demanded the sensation to be pulled in the manner of a scar being reopened, and their jaws were hanging down to speak their last words and the testaments they had not yet written.

But it was better to put them down, she thought, even if she did not consider herself some angel of mercy. It was better that way.

            Flavia pulled the dog tags off of them.

The ghouls moaned on the ground. A way away from her, cross-legged, the woman flickered like a dying light. Flavia wiped the glass clear.

            They were staring down on themselves, bent inwards, their hands open and empty in their lap. They were wearing blue, sky-blue.

            She kept the carbine steady. The stranger looked up at her, breathing in a lungful of desert sand. They must have surely been drowning there. She did not think that she would have seen them again.

            And then the sky became harsh and daunting and when she could finally make her way through the wind she found herself alone there.

-

            There was no light. She knew that the sun must have been in the sky, and that the sky was blood-red, and that it would rise again, but there was no light left in the world. Flavia felt across the wall. The stone ran below her. She pressed her knees into her chest.

                         And that beeping – it was too much for her – there was too much for the world and its eternal quiet. Then they came along the villas in agony, breathing, wondering, what had happened here. She swallowed her sickness down.

            There was not a light left in the world.

Something in her trembled, which until then had remained unmoved. From the end of the room, the radio flickered to life.

            Flavia fired. The bullet went into the sky, an unfamiliar wound in that sea of navy. She took a breath and the Mojave fell silent.

Her back was soaked with sweat and she had blood in her mouth. Flavia got to her feet. Around her, the empty plains were waiting to see what strange phantoms she had dreamt up to appear. Perhaps the Psycho was addling her.

            It was not that that had awoken her, but a signal picked up on the radio, calling her west, of a voice she did not know.

            Flavia grabbed her bag. She took Morticia and the last water she had and took off.

-

            “We can’t keep meeting like this.”

The Divide was barren. As she stood at the mouth of the snipers nest, the wind began to gather about her, pulling at her clothes and her braided hair. It felt the edges of the gas mask for a way in. Weeping with sickness, the dying bodies of the Burned Men lay below her.

And what had happened here, she wondered: was it her or the other, or both of them. And who had lived there before, and who had she been then?

The courier could feel the radiation scratching at her bare skin. There was no armour or gas masks that could keep it out, Flavia thought, scratching at her neck. She could feel it in her organs, its glowing violence.

In the heart of the Divide, a missile sounded. It began with a shaking of the earth.

            Flavia braced herself. It rose, from nowhere, into the emptiness and the heartlessness, and she watched until it had disappeared completely. The sand settled on the ground. She had made a fresh set of footprints on the volcanic earth, far too human for a place like that. In the distance, there was what could only have been an electric shock fired from a gun.

Something was down there with her.

            She followed the echo of the sound, across the whitening earth, to the Old World highway stretched into the sky. A deathclaw had fallen then, sending the crows flying. Beside it, the stranger reloaded the rifle.  
  
            They looked up at her. They had a scar on their lip – fresh – still running into their mouth.

Flavia paused. She wondered if they recognised her, beneath brahmin hide and a gas mask. She was still sweating with RadAway and half a dozen other chems keeping her alive. She had expected something to be said, she had hoped that they too would want to ask what it was that had formed inside of them.  
            They shouldered the gauss rifle and left.  
She felt the terrible instinct to follow them, but could not convince any good sense still in her. And they had had a look in their eyes, as if they had understood then that everybody was – at the end of everything – completely alone in the world, and there was nothing they could do that would change that.

            She slept under the pass of a highway that night. She preferred to sleep out in the open, especially on unfamiliar ground so that she would wake up to no surprises. Swinging from her makeshift hammock, she nodded off with the rifle in her arms. No surprises. Flavia didn’t want a Deathclaw stumbling over her in the middle of the night, or rats to steal her food while she slept. She would have to hope the rope would hold.

            “And they told me I had already been here. I and one other, walking right out of history deeper than we knew.”

            She awoke to sounds of someone dying.  
Flavia looked over her shoulder. There were Marked Men moving across the open ground some twenty feet below – Legion – or they had been once at least.  
            One of them was lying at the courier’s feet, unconscious or dead or somewhere in between, and another was loading a sniper from the roof of a bunker.

The .308 caught them a second before they fired. The last one standing knocked the rifle from their hands – and for a moment she saw a flash of the Mexican flag – and the stranger hit the ground with it.

            Flavia was already on her way down. She fired once – twice – until they fell.  

The stranger was already on their feet. They pulled a .45 on her. She set her sight on her.

 “Who the fuck are you?” she asked.

“Who the fuck are you?” A tremor passed through them. “We can’t keep meeting like this.”

            There was not another word said, as the warhead beside them had waited all its life, and they only had time to see the sun crash into the earth and the world to end, again.

-

            She thought that the stranger had died. Some primal feeling in her bones told her so, that she should only cross their arms over their chest and let the radiation lie over them.

            They took a breath.  
In another time, Jamie might have left them there, let the Divide eat them alive. Something in her stomach twisted – beyond her own knowing – and she followed that instinct blind. Some voices were best listening to, and her heart was beating so loud it was splitting her chest open.

            Jamie picked the woman up in both arms.

            The haze was growing by the moment. They wandered forever through the colourlessness, moving like ghosts, until Jamie became certain she was only carrying them in circles and that they might lose their minds there. She was losing her grip and pulled the strangers arm over her neck to keep a hold. They seemed small – smaller than they really were – like a child forced by terrible fortune through years of the wasteland.  
            The air was not settling and the place where the sky met the ground was the only certainty left in the world.

            It had begun to rave at them with a seismic fury; through the screaming of the Divide it knew, of their place in history, of the messenger, where it had passed from one hand to the other. Had she known then, about what they had done?

In the darkening sky another flare glowered. She watched it in silence.

The earth knew they were there, and it had remembered their names. She did not know how much more she would endure, but being human and facing certain death, she walked on anyway.  
            She had to bow her head to keep the sand from her eyes, and she pulled the gas mask back over the mouth of stranger to save them from suffocating. Against her, their chest rose and fell, like a sleeping cat. Perhaps neither of them would make it out of there alive.

Her skin was burning from the proximity to the bombs, so was theirs, and of all the things that might have killed her then her insides swore it would be the withdrawal. She took her last Med-X.

            The Marked Men were hungry again. A thousand storms had rushed the Divide and this was no different. She heard the footsteps down the steel walkways. Jamie fired through the sandstorm.

They came with bloody contempt that only her resolute need to survive could overcome. Eventually, they too disappeared behind her like statues left to time. She watched the last of their shadows become swallowed whole and felt a grief she had not known she had in her.

            The world eased. Somewhere, the blue of the sky was returning, bleeding and jagged but not yet dead, and she let out a sigh of relief older than the earth itself.

            At the temple door, the world had forgotten how to speak. She shifted the woman in her arms.

When she stepped inside, her heart was quiet again, and from her bleeding lips she did not know what to tell him, other than: “She’s dying.”

-

            Flavia did not remember falling asleep. The dawn light was rising.  
She knew somehow in her heart of hearts that she was close to the Mojave again. And the Marked Men and the burning and the holy fire beneath them, perhaps that was some terrible dream. She ran her hand over the bandages. One of her eyes was bound, but she would not lose it, she discovered later, and her arm was to her chest. It felt very real. She smelt like antiseptic.

            From that dark space of time where she was only half-sure she was existing at all, she recalled one thing.

“Jamie,” she said. It came out as a whisper.

The courier heard her nonetheless, and looked across her shoulder. She was sat at the mouth of the Divide, watching the sun rise, with the man beside her.

Their eyes met, as melancholic as the sky. There were a thousand things they would not say.

            “You’re awake.” She was wearing the same vault suit, more bloodied than the last time she had seen her.

What happened, she wanted to ask, but she did not have the heart for it. She was patient. She would wait. 

             “They told me what lies in the heart of the Divide, what can be found there. And the words to awaken it – and the ones to speak them,” Ulysses said. “Hello, courier.”

He was lit up in the golden light, a standard set on fire. She took her place beside him, on the edge of the world, and they looked out to see what they had done.


	2. Atom

                        She was not alone down there.   
The earth recalled its harrowing in the time before the atomic quiet, when man had taken up arms and said, Look what we can do, and nature said, Look what you cannot. It was quieter than anything she had ever known. The residual ash had washed the walls.

            The woman carried on. The rats in the surrounding earth were running blind, the sounds of the claws and squeaking driving her insane, when she heard a voice from behind her – “That you, Morales?” – but it was only the nightmare of a memory. She wondered how it had found her down there. Pieces of the mind came back to her in strange ways, rearranging themselves like shattered glass around the bullet hole left in her head. There was the draft of a doorway.

            And then something in that choleric mist had changed, and a breath of expectation invaded that particular haunting.

She pushed them into the wall and they took the force willingly.

 “What are you doing down here?” Flavia had the knife at her neck.

            “You were takin’ so long, thought you’d died on me,” Jamie said. Her expression softened. There was a scar on her lip still healing from all that time ago. It was strange how many lifetimes they had lived through.   
            Let’s just leave, the courier had said. They had packed like criminals in the night.

            Flavia was flush against her. “Worryin’ about me?”  
She did not move the knife. Jamie pushed her off before she had to answer. Her shoulder would be bruised the next morning, though. Jamie did not mind the bruises.

“Find anythin’?” she asked.

Flavia shrugged. “Few bodies.”

They panned the light down the vault corridor, and a thousand eyes glowed back at them. There was still blood on the wall.

            “Wonder what happened here?”

Jamie stared down into the mouth of the vault. “The less I know the better.”

            The storm outside had been rising since the break of day – an animal rage wrought onto the desert – and they had to tie themselves together so they did not lose one another in the storm.

            Flavia found her way out first, pulling the other from the screaming wind into the strange haze of golden light. They had bandaged their faces to stop the sand from suffocating them.   
            When they looked, the earth was lighter and older and they moved like sleepwalkers across what could only have been another world entirely, like lepers risen from the dead and unbundling themselves, until they were sure there was nobody else left on earth, and that they could be finally content together in their quiet Eden. What a relief the silence was to them.

            Moon’s out already, Flavia saw, an ill-placed ring in an otherwise yellow sky. The heat from noon would drop all at once; it would be no surprise if it froze over.

            From a lifetime of purposeful solitude they would have untied the ropes with the desperation of the drowning, but they found that they had reached the homestead still strung together like newborns.  How could they feel like anything else, skinned as they were?   
            Did two creatures left half-dead make one dead animal? Jamie had not been sleeping well in the night. She ran it through her hand, the umbilical cord. The air burned her, but the courier pulled her along and she took it with ease.

            “Never saw one without the other,” Raul had said one day. What loveliness it was, though, that even their shadows had one another. Neither of them had known that they could be quite so reciprocated standing in front of a mirror.

            By sunset, the heat had still not yet forgiven them. There was sweat running down her temples and her jaw was working with unease. Jamie took another drink.

            Flavia waited inside, watching her watch the sun.

            They called the cattle in before dark. Their eyes flashed green in the nuclear light and spooked the nightstalkers on the porch. In the sullen hours to come Jamie would sit and read and drink in the chair, her rifle propped against the railing. There had not been that kind of peace for as long as she had known.   
            At one o’clock, every night, she would come back inside and lay down beside her breathing body until she saw the sun through the windows. The woman looked wonderfully real. She ran her fingers over the burn on her side weightless enough that she would not stir. The Mojave bred light sleepers.   
            Her hair, so dark it was almost black, shone copper at the birth of dusk. That was when she became alive, at the horizon’s ending. Some nights she swore her whole being was alight. The sun became damned. Jamie watched her ribs move back and forth with her loveliness. How long had it been since she had slept? She could not recall.

            For miles around the homestead, the coyotes began to yowl.   
Premonitions of the desert, Flavia had always been told. Jamie had known the same, although she no longer remembered it. It would be a relief if the rain fell.   
Flavia lit a cigarette out on the porch.

            “You alright?” Jamie asked.

            “It’s never been so quiet.”

-

                        They came in the night.   
Jamie had been awake for hours, not sure where she began or where she ended except for the surgical scar down her hairline where she had been completed.   
            The nightstalkers twitched at her feet and she wished for such consolation as dreaming. Jamie liked them, though, they would protect the family if one of them was ever gone. She brushed the back of their ears.   
            Beyond the final steps of the homestead, the sand ached. She felt an urge to bury her hands in it in sympathy. Instead she stood in the doorway and thought of Flavia asleep in the bed, and how she wanted to sleep there with her, but something inside of her became sad and silent and filled her lungs with flowers.

            When they had found the homestead just months before it was a shack barely standing in its own grave. Somebody had taken to time to mark the graves out the back at least.   
            They took the beams and the roofing apart and cut down Joshua trees for when they needed them, methodically, working in the shade in midday.   
            The two nightstalker eggs had only just hatched and they would spend the days chasing one another across the sand. Their peculiar spines were still not fully fused between the two halves of their genetic autonomy, and while they were young they could still manoeuvre in the manner of a snake eating its tail.   
            Eventually they had fallen into the same patterns as their family; they would wake in the morning to scavenge plane wrecks and empty vaults and find a place for a siesta at noon.   
At night, they heard them stalk the homestead looking for mice. They were more cat than coyote, the courier would swear. The four serpentine eyes staring down from the beams had become somewhat mundane.   
            And the brahmin – calling from the plateau – they had appeared out there one morning without a sound. Some nights before they had found them at a husbandry a few miles north and cut them free before the nuclear storm brought down its own lesson of mercy. The instinct of prey animals drove them home. When they stood there shaking they could see the outline of every organ in their bodies and the split of their bone at their necks. They had found the well too and drank themselves giddy.

            Jamie would go to check on them again in the night. A calf looked out under its mothers legs. The two-headed monstrosity had the eyes of a child: it had walked right out of post-war Bethlehem into the world.

            The courier looked back at them. She too had the eyes on an insomniac. That was the last thing she could remember at least.

-

            Flavia had awoken because something in the bottom of her stomach told her to. The white dress that had clung to her sent a shiver over her skin. Her hair was in rivers. The human body was its own guardian angel.

            God, the Mojave changed in moments: when she had slept she could not breathe for the heat and could only lay sprawled out until it cooled. The night told her she would never see the sun again. She was sat bolt upright, although she did not recall doing so. Morticia was leaning against the cabinet and she reached for it instinctively.

            A gunshot rang out. Flavia could have sworn she heard the sound of horses whinnying. Perhaps the strange state between dreaming and waking had overcome her. She pushed her fingernails into her palms. Colder than the dead, it seemed.   
            Outside, the eyes in the clouds turned. It would not be warm again for hours. 

            When she was a child, taking her first steps through the dark had felt like a death sentence. But the world had wearied her and wearied her as it did with all things moving.

            “Grant?” she asked. The first room was empty. She readied the gun again.

            The moon had come through the front door and painted the world white and sea blue.   
Around her, the house sighed, exorcising a last breathe. And the quiet – it was too much – a quiet before a glass hit the floor. Her foot arched before the steps and the world ready to grace her. The sky expected a scream, a wounding. She was seven years old and walking down a corridor where ghosts stood; a girl as tall as the gun, her heart turned into something wild. There were worst things than ghosts, she told herself, the harvest and the gold and the sounds, echoing out of her in the night. Perhaps that place did want her to forget, or to start again as they had: she had felt dead the moment she arrived.   
            And Jamie pulled her out of the blood-redness between those hysterical moments when it had all become too much – the smell of the fog that had infected her marrow would emerge from her skin – neither of them could hide it.

            “Grant?” The front room was deserted and the door was open. I am being haunted, she thought. I am haunted from the inside out. Perhaps that place had found her again after all.

            The Geiger counter flickered meekly.   
At the window, the book was sat on the railing and Paciencia was undisturbed. It was as if they had gotten up in the middle of the night and walked away, left the dead to watch over her. Her skin was humming. She had not died there, she told herself, I did not die, I did not die. Jamie knew she was not dead yet.  

            “You’re here with me,” she would tell her, as she was held down on the bed by the weight of her body. Goddammit she swore she only inhabited that strange house they called human.

            But then – four cosmic eyes – the nightstalkers emerged at the doorway.   
They had begun to fret across the sand maddeningly. One of them had scrounged 10mm casings. The courier had not gone down without a fight. And Flavia, lost so close by in a miasma of a reverie, she was losing her edge.

            “Grant?” There were footprints in the sand – deep at the front – and blood on the trail.   
            She knelt down over the earth where they had taken her, and for a moment she wanted nothing more than to curl her head over her knees and clutch her body in case the wind pulled at every thread of her being and scattered them across the sand.

            It rose and grasped at her lovingly; she did not have the time for it. Instead she allowed herself to stand.  
Her mind had begun to quieten, finally. How much time had passed? Light would be on the horizon soon, the brahmin could feel it in the air. The courier straightened up and took the gun in her hands.

            The nightstalkers followed her inside. Flavia pulled on a cotton shirt and a belt and a messenger bag. She filled it with some meds and water and a tied a switchblade to her leg. Hanging on the door, the gas mask did not make a sound. Her hand shook. She took it anyway.

            At her feet, the creatures chirped. “Let’s go,” she said, whistling for them to follow.

-

            In the autumnal earth the atoms were moving.  
Her presence had annulled the darkness because she had taken form, albeit not absolute as any humans are, and that empty space began to grieve.   
            Jamie felt about her. Her left hand was crushed – better that than her right – from the underfoot of fight or flight. There was nothing around her for miles; she began to count them, the people she had known; Ulysses, the oracle, standing watch over the Divide, the courier passing her hand in the valley, the people that had forgotten her, the strangers that wondered where she was headed, the bull on the hill and the eyes in the tower, those ambling like orphans under the bear, the souls standing on the farmland to watch. And Benny, a fragmented remnant of him in a mirror somewhere. “Hey, kid.”

            Courier, she thought dimly. Where had she gone? There were lessons to be learned from loss, they both knew that well. She held her hand to her chest. The blood was the colour of the desert flowers they left on graves.   
            And where was Flavia, waking to a bed half-cold while Jamie stood smoking on the porch. But even when she was in pieces she had only ever thought of the woman, her hours had become robbed by the thought of her, her body humming like the sun as she slept.   
            There had been nights were they could not sleep unless every manipulation of their bodies was entwined with the other, and those days would come again sometime. That felt like peace, that two-headed monster, hands locked together and legs disappearing into one another. A second innocence after the loveliness of childhood had been ripped out of them.

            There was not a thing in the world left of Flavia down there, not the light in the morning or the smell of cotton, the way the curtains moved. She was detached, even in love, but when she touched her the sun burned her hands. To Jamie, that was a revelation.

            The earth had contracted around her and her with it. Christ, she thought.   
She needed to find her way forward. It seemed to her to be a pre-War mine, a pillaging. What life had they found down here? Her left hand hit the bars and she gasped. There was flesh blood emerging at the bone.

            The door did not shift even when she threw her weight against it. And the lock – shit, she thought – they had taken the bobby pins out of her hair.   
            Beyond the cell, the pathway was illuminated in the half-light.

            Her bandoleer and belt were gone and they had taken her .45. Goddamn them. Further, in the air, she could smell what she would realise hours later to be the smell of burning Radaway.

            Jamie rested her head against the bars. The split down her skin was opening to allow in the light. All at once she understood why the sky itself was afraid of lightening. She pushed at the door again.  

            “Don’t do that.”

            She was not alone down there.

            “Won’t change anything.”

            Jamie forced herself upright. At the end of the cage, something curled its arms around its knees. The air seethed down through the bars.

            “What are you doin’ down here?” she asked.   
Nobody had come to relight the lanterns. In a cage above the door, a canary was dead. It was not the day for the envious.

            “Atom,” the stranger said.

            “How long have you been down here?”

            “I don’t know,” they said, and she did not hear a word from them again.

            But she could not bring herself to wander down that pitiless darkness, and the steel certainty of the bars was the only thing she could hold onto. Jamie had more to ask, how many were there and what weapons were they carrying and had they been down there so long they would no longer had the strength to fight back if it came to it but the voice had faded a long time ago. Her organs shivered with a shameless longing she could not name. She surrounded them and rested her head against her knees. Those were the prices she paid.  

                        The woman prayed they had not got her too.   
            The world had taught her long ago to have splendored in the peacetime, and she had, because she knew all things must end, and she could recall with a lover’s eyes everything she had made herself remember. This would not be taken away with a shot to the head. Her body was growing cold.   
            Too cold, if she did not do something soon.

            “You burn me,” she had told Flavia, her hand finding hers across the bed.   
The fires made bodies scream. Jamie had screamed with them. Only the sun in the morning or at the end of the day brought them peace.

            Flavia had looked over her shoulder and smiled at her, the first time she had seen her ever smile.   
The woman seemed abashed by herself, but the sun on her skin had reawakened something that may have died a few lifetimes ago. The dawn made it all worth suffering.

            Her eyes wept with relief.   
A courier never stopped moving, not even at night in the manner that only someone running forward understood. Prey animals heard stories of them; they only knew of being hunted for sport.

It had taken a bullet, a blow to the bone, for her before she did not get back on her feet. And the sand took her with a mother’s love.

-

            When she died, Flavia wondered if flowers would be laid at her grave and she half-wished that they wouldn’t. Whoever had left the date tree leaves had loved them; there were few people left in the world that she had loved, and she would rather be buried with them.            

            Revisiting the dead was surely just another burden of memory.   
The graves laid beside one another wreathed in dying red and yellow flowers. The third, at the foot of them, was half the size, the holy spirit left to rest.

            But the sand was empty. “They never found them,” a homesteader told her from a dead orchard. He had been pulling the weeds out of the earth anyway. If he stayed out there much longer he was sure to get sunstroke. She wondered why nobody had told to come back inside.

            But surely that was the way of the Mojave; only the strong survive, the rest wait in the ground while they grow old and visit the graves and wished their bodies had been softer.

            Flavia did not have time for his story.   
The nightstalkers led her onwards. It had been a journey of ten miles in an excruciating condition.

            In the morning the wagon had been pulled along the cool street and the people knew better than to wake.

            But for her the children had emerged barefoot in their doorways to see the spectacle.   
“That ain’t a dog,” one of them said. The mother pulled them back inside. A boy was shooting lizards with a BB gun down the way.

            Boredom bred those things.   
And the sun was making people cruel, she knew, like the violence of a fever in the mortal body. The ground was white as nuclear snow, and acres of wheat and desert flowers had long since passed to salt flats. The last monument of the nameless settlement they had carved in the red rock: The sun is killing me. And the handprint a deathbed prayer in the desperation that they would not be forgotten; I was here, it begged, whispering down to their bacterial need to continue through one form and the next, descendant after tired descendant, now naively splayed on the earth that would outlast them by far. No one will remember you, the sun blazed.   
            Two feet below the earth at least, the stranger had had one last cigarette and a lukewarm beer before they dried out into eclectic earth.

            Those people had always been too loud, she swore, and Jamie knew the same.   
There were days where they would lie in bed and the heat made their backs stick to the sheets and it did not matter because they were together breathing in their silence. Their legs shaking with fire, the wind moving the curtains, these patterns they had adopted without uttering. Coffee in the morning with whiskey in the night. The sun was in bars in Flavia’s eyes, a burnt brown, a brown the Old World had never known.   
            This was the time they belonged to, one and the other, the blue of the mornings and the sound of the crows, their nights of gin rummy and Pre-War novels: they could not exist in any other.

            “Ready?” one of them would ask.

            “Ready,” the other replied, and they turned over the next page.

            Flavia pulled her scarf down.

            “Who are you?” the boy asked. The sun was burning his skin beneath his overalls. She recalled that time of childhood pleasure, chasing the other fosterlings while the grownups worked.

            “Get back inside,” she told him.

-

            When they reached the crater the nightstalkers became spooked. Not even such make-belief creatures of the Mojave would be found there.   
            In 2077 the nuclear bombs had ruptured the earth and made its mass grave for the dead. Not a single person living could remember it. And now, the plateau at her feet was a seething cesspit of gamma mist. This was where the earth taught its lesson to the living: if I cannot kill you infection will. Flavia pulled the gas mask on. After the Madre, it felt like heresy. The mist did things to the mind. The nightstalkers could taste it and their unease worsened. Flavia wondered how much further would she go, how far would any of them? Perhaps the people had been right to lock their doors at night.  

            The mouths of the twins were burning.  
At the bottom of the crater, she was swallowed whole. Nature did not forgive. The woman could not see two feet in front of her but for the spectres standing at the edges of her immediate horizon.

            Her body was falling away around her. She swore the blood in her veins was glowing gold.

            At one point, she thought she saw a body in the water, human or animal or something else entirely. Where it eased the shapes of bombers and wretchedness emerged and they had to guide themselves around undetonated minefields. There were too many places in Nevada left dormant there. She told herself that she was living still.   
            Something in the clouds was watched her.   
The eyes were completely blind and still it knew she was standing there as well as she knew herself she was not alone. Stepping through the cesspits, the animal did not do so much as flinch at the acid water. The world had numbed them all.   
            The skin along it head was peeling and raw but the stinging air had dressed it like a lovers hands. Its teeth – horrific – were naked along its jaw. It bowed its head in apprehension.

            A second appeared beside it. The horse’s manes were streaked with congealed radiation and their bones half-bare. Her gorge rose. It was a quality of prey animals to continue standing while they were falling apart. When it finally approached her it reached for her hand and let her touch its neck where it bled. The horse flinched.

            I’m sorry, she thought, and it brushed against her one more time before turning back into the sea-green nothingness and disappearing. What else was down there, living in some certain hell the sky could not reach. She was taking too much time.  

            The nightstalkers were roused from the wreck of a vertibird. Their eyes were already dulled. Flavia crouched to reassure them.

            And when she heard the distant beeping every muscle in her body, every animal instinct in her organs shrieked. Her hands were in her hair. The synapses of her mind told her to run, she knew she ought to run, but her body remained a carcass of her history and the history of that place.   
She might have stood there for a hundred more years, unmoved by whatever hope there was left in her. It began to rain.

            The rain fell to the cesspools and the sickness and it wept for the earth. It too had forgotten what it meant to grieve.   
            And soon her clothes were soaked and her hair dripping and she took off the mask to feel that sadness on her skin. Perhaps there was hope for them yet, even then. Sometimes God gave them second chances, Jamie had once told her. The world turned grey.   
            `And at last – she understood what it meant when sailors cried at the sight of land – the cavern was ahead of her. From its stomach came a scream.

            Flavia moved along the darkness.   
There the primordial earth shrieked like a new life form emerged, long before any animal living saw the world.  The Mojave had forgotten the place for a thousand years.

            It grew from the pools at the cave floor haloed every colour she had ever known. This is where the world would start again, long after they all perished in each other’s arms.   
She stood in the doorway of a man-made wound, here were nature screamed.   
If this would be her last word, it would be words of love.

            To her left there were shadows on the wall.   
And the carbine in her hands had never felt like that before, an extension of her own being, where impulse ruled first. The impulse to hurt, she knew, to take back what was hers. She wanted them to know what this loss had meant. Flavia had not felt anger like that since she was a child. There were things buried in her riddled bones she thought she had forgotten.

            Below her, the Children had congregated.

            “Son of a bitch,” she whispered.   
One of them had crouched among the morbid rosettes as if to touch the water. They lived in a burial site; their sunken chapel stood holy white, as if some ancient creature had awoken in the rock and found itself petrified.   
            She dropped to the walkway, half-lit in the glower. There would come a time the children would tell ghost stories of her, the ghost they swore they had seen that night, that now lived in the dark of the deep caverns and preyed on the atomic resplendence.   
            Flavia made her way to the door, where the pews were aching with memories of the Old World. There, in the bell tower, a Glowing One stared down at her. She was ready then to put it down, one shot to the head and a second if she had to, but it only held onto the bars of its birdcage with domesticated curiosity. She ought to put it out of its misery.

            The gun was in the top room.   
For a moment she did not dare to touch it. Such holy things, surely, were not for her. Instead she took the jailer’s keys and the cigarettes and the bandoleer. Something in the mechanics of her heart swallowed their sorrow, an act of cannibalism. The woman was alive.

            καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει 

          καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν

            What other relics had they taken of her, what history, she thought. Some things were worse than losing an organ, that much she knew. In its cage, the ghoul had curled on the floor.

            She ran. Their consecrated ground sighed.   
North of the cavern, the passages stretched out into impossible darkness, darkness like she had never known, and the nightstalkers ran ahead calling to her along the way. Perhaps they had found the scent again.   
            Whatever was left of the prospectors mines, the church had left it to its haunting and the woman had learnt that dark so well the lanterns nearly blinded her. She threw up her arm.  

            “Grant?” Beside her, one of the twins ran its cheek on her leg. The doors lined the way, each emptier than the last, older than she knew. Her heart was beating something wild, the way a body did in the presence of something morbid, and she swore her ribs would break under the force of it.

            “Jamie?” She felt along the bars to find her way because the horror had become insurmountable and the night had claimed her there and then.   
            When she opened the door the woman on the floor turned and looked at her, her blood blackened and her hands out before her as if she was begging for God to save her, but Jamie had never begged anyone, not since all those years when he left her child’s heart for dead. Flavia held the woman against her and tucked a stray lock behind her ear.

            “It’s okay,” she told her, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”   

            “Morales?” The courier bound her hand in her scar before she bled out completely and found the stimpaks. By the time she had roused a little more, Flavia had already seen the figure curled at the end of the cage, but they had grown cold hours before and when she went to move them the body crumpled.

            “We have to go now,” Flavia said. Her hand clutched the .45.   
Best shot this side of the Colorado, the woman had once grinned. Only second, Flavia had told her.

            They were up on their feet when the light hit the faces of the children, their skin tinged with something preternatural, their eyes like those at a séance. Flavia pulled her arm around her. Behind them, the children scattered.

            Flavia would not wait around. The endless oblivious engulfed them entirely and for the first time she thanked God for that. It was only once the light had begun to break through that she heard the church bell ringing.

            As they broke free of that godforsaken place the scout saw them and went to fire and the nightstalkers were upon them, blood and bone and screaming, and Jamie looked away.   
            The ground dropped suddenly and without warning. Jamie fired over her shoulder. It had caught one of them in the chest and sent them staggering.   
            Since her arrival there, the rain had continued to fall – the plateau was cleared into a floodplain of white light. The Children that had gone to run out the cavern brought themselves to a halt; for a heartbeat, she would have sworn they were in mourning. The last thing Flavia saw was them in their gas masks before she pulled her into the mist.

-

            The twins could smell gunpowder in the mist and the metallic perfume of a bloody body.   
Quivering, they fled the scene of the crime, reckless in their state of complete ecstasy. It had been so long since they had hunted. The sound of the water would draw more of them, they knew, and they tasted the air with expectation.

            One of them stopped along the spine of a fallen Joshua tree.   
In the distance – a screaming – and they loped down towards them. The scout was dead already, riddled with lead, and the nightstalkers crossed the trail.

            Flavia had been whistling for them for some time.   
She was afraid more of the Children might hear her, but she was not going to abandon them in a place like that. From the gloom, a horse called back to her.

            Jamie was able to stand on her own again but her bullets weren’t landed like they should have and she knew she would not let the woman die there with her. Flavia whistled again. The eyes of ghosts emerged, crying black streaks down their faces. She reached out for them to come closer.   
            The first had threatened to bolt, but the second, knowing her in the terror of its marrow, leaned out.

            “Good girl,” she whispered, drawing her closer. The rain had soaked their hides pitilessly. “Here,” she took Jamie’s arm.

            Half-dead already, the woman reached over its flank and with a last push was on the back of the animal, which teetered for a moment but knew better. Flavia pulled herself up behind her.

            Jamie leant back into her, leading her hand round her stomach to keep her steady. The nightstalkers smelled them in the mist and called out to one another.   
            Flavia prayed they were alive; it had been enough death for one lifetime. And the faces in the mist, glowing eyes and black hoods and the dread that exorcised her body of all it had, she could not live in that state any longer.

            The animal slowed as the ground rose and the air thinned. Somewhere behind them, the twins echoed their calls, closer and closer and Flavia called them on.   
            But she would not rest until they were home.   
When they found came upon the road again she found the animals following her, the other horse almost frantically, and held Jamie tighter. Get us out of this place, she thought, for the love of God.   
            In the fog, the rain had finally conceited and the radioactive suffering had reclaimed the earth. The Children of Atom, back where they belonged, watched the last light disappear on the horizon.  

-

            The bath water had cooled by the time she brought her over.   
When Jamie slunk against the cracked porcelain the sun had burned her so lovingly inside and out steam rose from the water.   
            Flavia washed the blood from her back and dressed her hands. Her hair was getting black at the roots again. When she was done she climbed in with her and held her for so long that the sun had begun to rise again in the sky.

            Outside, the nightstalkers continued scavenging for whatever they could find, and the horses congregated with the brahmin to feed. Flavia kissed her neck and her wrists and dressed them both. She had wanted nothing more than to lay in the bed there with her, but she would rather die than let them hurt her as all people could, and she was shocked by the revelation of how much of her mother had possessed her in that moment; for days after she thought of the woman with the bitter obsession of a daughter, who saw the sky and knew it did not love or hate or deem any reason for being, not like them and their insatiable desire for words, and it could end each day without knowing it was ever blue. She wondered if that was relief. Perhaps that was why she would prefer the company of Jamie, reading and writing as if it was her religion. There were worse things.   
            Beyond the windows, the night had stirred.

            Against the compulsive wind the horses skin twitched, all ribs and muscle and whitened eyes. Flavia had brought them some Dandy Boy Apples in the morning.

            When the night came she read aloud to Jamie, even when she was asleep, and washed her wounds with alcohol. Soon the clinical smell rose off her body in her sweat and her tears if she had forgotten where she was.

            Within three days, she was out and walking again. Although the Children did not return, they scoured the roads for them religiously. Some things could not be forgotten.

            “You’re home now,” Flavia would tell her when she awoke at night in a fever.

            “So are you,” Jamie said.

            “Thank God for that,” and they would rest at last.


End file.
